Shape & Lead
Can the carbon plan become a business?
Which low-carbon offers will clients and partners actually pay for?
Which low-carbon offers will clients and partners actually pay for?
The decarbonisation roadmap exists and it is a cost plan: new equipment, new energy contracts, new reporting. Somewhere in the organisation a few people believe it could also be a revenue plan. A low-carbon version of the product. A service that helps clients hit their own Scope 3 number. A by-product that a neighbour would buy. These ideas live in a lab, a working group or a slide. They reach the market late or never, because the path from idea to offer runs through gates that were built for the core business and read anything responsible as a review step where it should be a design brief.
The CFO asks a fair question: by Eurostat's count, eleven per cent of EU companies brought a new-to-market product innovation between 2020 and 2022, so why would ours be among them, on this subject of all subjects.
Whether to build offers and, if so, how the company builds them.
The decision is about the machine rather than about any single idea: who generates ideas, how they are filtered, who kills them and why, how long it takes from a concept to a pilot with a paying client and what criteria a low-carbon offer has to meet at each gate, commercially and in the value it creates for the clients who will pay for it, the employees who will build it and the communities it touches. A company gets a portfolio when it decides the machine, and a lab when it decides idea by idea, however good the ideas.
The work is Innovation Architecture Design. Its premise is that innovation is a system and that responsibility belongs inside the system, as a design principle, and not at the end as a check.
We audit the current engine first: where ideas come from, where they stall, how long the journey actually takes and what it costs. For a Chief Innovation Officer this produces evidence for a structural redesign, where it usually has anecdotes; for a fund it tells whether a portfolio company's innovation spend is producing commercial value or expensive optionality with no path to conversion. We look specifically at how the carbon plan and the innovation pipeline talk to each other, which is usually not at all.
Then we design the architecture: the portfolio logic across core, adjacent and transformational bets, the stage-gate criteria with the responsibility dimensions written in as design requirements, the decision rights, the funding model and the team configuration. Each is tested against the P&L and against the people who will have to run it. For a scale-up the design has one extra constraint: it must still work at five hundred people without the bureaucracy that scale usually brings.
What leaves the room is an innovation charter: portfolio logic, governance, gate criteria, operating model, budget framework and team, in one document the board can approve and the innovation lead can start on the following quarter.
The case below sorts low-carbon offers into three lines: designed into the product the client already needs, sold beside it as a programme or funded apart as a bet. It reads that split in Schneider Electric's 2026 releases, where Energy Management grew while the group's efficiency and sustainability programme offers declined, and places the choice at the first gate of the pipeline. A carbon plan becomes a business at that gate.
The carbon a client pays for is built into the product they need; the programme sold beside it waits for a budget.
ReadPhilippe Bourrat, COO & Co-Founder. Twenty-eight years grounding innovation in market realities for industrial and B2B leaders, from materials and smart buildings to mobility and process electrification. He holds the client side of each bet: which low-carbon offer a client will buy, at what price.
Maxime Ferrand, Senior Partner. Sixteen years at Enedis across innovation, digital transformation and EV-charging deployment. He holds the engine: how an idea becomes a pilot and a pilot becomes an offer inside a large organisation and what the gates must ask for it to hold once delivered.
Added afterwards, responsibility is a cost the total absorbs until it fails. Multiplied into the business model, it raises what performance earns. An offer designed that way from the first gate is the difference between a carbon plan and a business.
Read the equation in Our Approach: The Fusion EquationThe roadmap that is only a cost, the ideas that never leave the lab, the client who asked for the low-carbon version. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.